krainaksiazek freewheeling riding in italy book i 20168995

François Robichon de la Guérinière (1688-1751) was born in Essay, a small town near Alençon, where his father was a lawyer; he was also an officer at the court of the Duchess of Orleans. La Guérinière was a pupil of Antoine de Vendeuil, who was "Écuyer ordinaire de la grande ecurie" in Versailles between 1680 and 1717. In 1715, de la Guérinière received the title as "Écuyer du Roi," which entitled him to give lessons. In 1730, Prince Charles of Lorraine, "Grand Écuyer de France" (Master of the Horse) named him director of the Royal Stables at the Tuileries, which had been founded by Antoine de Pluvinel, Louis XIII's teacher. De Pluvinel is best know for his work: The Maneige Royal, 1626 [Xenophon Press 2010].
La Guérinière's book, École de Cavalerie, was first published in 1731 and again under different titles between 1733 and 1802. It consists of three parts: Knowledge of the Horse In and Out of the Stable; Training; and Treatment of Illness.
This expanded volume contains all Chapters I - XXII of the Second Part of École de Cavalerie, entitled ''De La Manière de Dresser Les Chevaux, Suivant Les Diferens Usages Auxquels On Les Destine.'' (The Method of Training Horses According to the Different Ways in Which They Will Be Used). Chapters XIX through XXII are new to this edition and contain valuable information pertinent to today's riders and trainers. In discussing subjects as the training of the war horse, the hunt horse, the coach horse and other matters such as tournaments, jousting, carousels, etc., the author reveals important training advice that will be invaluable to riders of many disciplines. The illustrations used are reproduced from the 1733 edition. Further expanding this edition is an Appendix including a new translation of Chapter VI from Part I: On the bridle. Part II, the training portion of the three volume book heavily references the bridle and the use of the rider's hands. As editor, I felt it was important to include these detailed descriptions and recommendations of the time as most are completely applicable to today's rides especially with the interest in historic bits, bridles and equipment.
École de Cavalerie is one of the best works on equitation ever to appear in France. In fact, it would not be an exaggeration to say that after a long struggle beginning in the renaissance academies of Italy, equitation in France suddenly flowed forth from La Guérinière. To quote the late Head of the Spanish Court Riding School in Vienna, Colonel Alois Podhajsky,
"It was the great riding master La Guérinière who produced the most revolutionary book on riding of all time. Unlike [those by] his predecessors, his book is clear and easy to understand. He based it on simplicity and facts, in order to be completely understood by his readers." His principles are still "applied unaltered at the Spanish Court Riding School and may be seen there in daily use."
It is for these reasons that La Guérinière is considered the Father of French Equitation and the Father of Modern Dressage; and it is impossible to read a book about dressage without finding his name mentioned, credit given to him, and an occasional quote from his work. Thus, the serious horse-person who takes the time to read La Guérinière's work cannot help but enrich his/her own knowledge by discovering the depth and quality of information that forms the base of much of our equestrian theory.

'I'm going back to what I was twenty years ago. I'm riding across a terrain of buried curiosity, the adrenaline is starting to flow again, and the old obsessions are coming back: I want to start doing cocaine every day, I want to run after every female who passes, I want to smell the smells of Italy again, I want my old life back. It's a bit late for all that, I know, but who gives a fuck? I want to die stark naked, drowned in a well of Ballantine's, surrounded by whores. All this I want, suddenly, I want it very much indeed. But I hide it well.' This is the story of Tony Pagoda, a hero of our time, a man of incredible energies and appetites with a dark secret in his past and a unique perspective on the world. 1980s Italy is Tony's oyster. A charismatic singer, he is talented and successful, up to his neck in money, drugs and women, enjoying an extravagant lifestyle in Naples and Capri. But when life gets complicated, Tony decides it's time for a change. While on tour, he disappears to Brazil and an existence free from excess, where all he has to worry about are the herculean cockroaches.
But after eighteen years of humid Amazonian exile, somebody is willing to sign a giant cheque to bring Tony back to Italy. How will he face the temptations of his old habits and the new century? A huge bestseller in Italy, Everybody's Right is an extraordinary debut novel from the award-winning film director Paolo Sorrentino. It is a book about Italy and a book about the modern world; a book about Tony and a book about all of us. Through Tony's irresistible voice Sorrentino illustrates his imaginative power and his incredible gifts for drama and satire.

September 6, 2006
BOOKS OF THE TIMES
With Pluck and Luck, Surviving a Fascist Nightmare
By WILLIAM GRIMES
At the beginning of 1939, a young Frenchwoman named Mireille Journet made a decision. She
would accompany her lover, a German artist and fervent anti-Nazi, to his hometown, Stuttgart,
so that he could put his mothers affairs in order.
Six months. That was the agreement. Then history intervened. For the duration of the war, the
couple, who married in a Nazi civil ceremony, lived an existence that lurched wildly between
the absurd and the horrific. Mireille Journet, now Marokvia and in her late 90s, captures it
movingly in her precise, beautifully written memoir, a strange tale of two bohemians caught up
in a totalitarian nightmare.
Ms. Marokvia was a country girl with an appetite for adventure. As a student at the Sorbonne,
she fell for a dashing artist she took to be a Russian, but soon discovered was a German of
Slovak descent. In the Paris of the 1930s, they lived the way artists were supposed to, taking
their aperitifs at the Dme and racing off on mad quests. In one characteristic episode, the man
Ms. Marokvia calls Abel (Artur in real life) crosses into Spain to buy horses for a riding
vacation and ends up imprisoned in a Spanish jail. There, fed two sardines a day, he waits his
turn to be shot as a Russian spy. A well-timed telegram from the German consul frees him at
the 11th hour.
Ms. Marokvia, also blessed with pluck and luck, makes a perceptive, wry witness to events in
Germany, where she led a threatened but charmed life. On the face of it, two anti-Nazis, one of
them French, and theother incapable of keeping his opinions to himself, would seem to stand
little chance of survival in Hitlers Germany. But Abel, with an artists gift for making
connections in the right circles, always managed to squeak through. His wife, quick to learn
German, played her cards shrewdly, too, steering clear of trouble and patiently observing with
a perceptive but not unsympathetic eye. Unlike her husband, Ms. Marokvia could find it in her
heart to like Germany and Germans, the decent ones.
Circumstances, and her husbands postings abroad to do military illustrations in Ukraine, Italy,
Finland and Yugoslavia, sent Ms. Marokvia all over Germany. She saw it in triumph and
despair. She lived in big cities like Stuttgart and Berlin. She encountered humble Germans in
Sankt Peter, a fishing village on the North Sea, where she labored as a weaver, and in
Bergheim, a village in the Black Forest near the Swiss border, where she rented a reputedly
haunted house and raised a goat.
In Bergheim, a peasant neighbor, eager to converse with an educated woman, springs a
question that has been troubling him for years. This obsession the Nazis seem to have with the
Jews. What is that all about?
Ms. Marokvia observes. Abel seethes. She finds Berlin attractive, and Berliners, too. "They
seemed to have a dry wit I could enjoy," she writes. Abel scowls. "Pretentious and overbearing,"
he tells her.
When they catch sight of Hermann Gring coming out of a government building, Ms.
Marokvia, fascinated, leans forward for a closer look. "His cheeks were plump, rosy and
smooth," she writes. "He wore makeup, I swear." Abel broods. "For days, weeks, he was
obsessed by having been close enough to the sinister clown to kill him," Ms. Marokvia writes.
On one occasion, providing one of the most satisfying moments in the book, Abel loses all
sense of reality and confronts a Nazi official at a dinner party given by Abels boss, the head of
an advertising agency, in a suburb of Stuttgart. After the official begins railing against the Jews,
Abel approaches him and says: "You, I want to tell you something. You are an idiot, and your
Adolf also." Then he administers a slap in the face. "After that," Ms. Marokvia writes, "what we
called animal fear sat by our side."
Nothing came of the incident. The official was on the way down and embroiled in party
infighting. Abel also managed to avoid combat duty late in the war. Sent to basic training, he
threw himself on the ground during a field exercise. Every war needs dead people, he told his
perplexed sergeant, who turned his attention to more promising material and sent his
hopeless, overage recruit home.
Ms. Marokvia, in her own small way, resisted. Early in the war she refused an offer by the
Gestapo to return to France as an informer. Later, when she was hired by a publisher to
translate mystery novels into French, she put her own spin on orders from above.
"I did adaptation for French taste, as required, turning tall, blond, handsome Aryans into
short, darker non-Aryans," she writes. "Some types even got wavy hair and fleshy noses." More
seriously, she helped some escaped Polish prisoners find their way to the Swiss border from
her village in the Black Forest.
Here and there, some Germans also resisted, or atleast tried to get at the truth. The village
priest in Bergheim pointedly omits the required Nazi formulas from his sermons. Others
furtively listen to the BBC. In Sankt Peter, a shop owner employs a Jewish weaver and hides
her.
"There are so many of us," Ms. Marokvia once tells her husband, who corrects her sharply. "No,
there are not," he responds. "We just attract each other and lose perspective." True.
Almost unbelievably, Ms. Marokvia considers staying in Germany after the war. Her husband
has other ideas. But Paris, they find, is not the same Paris they knew. Some former friends
denounce them. Knowing only a few words of English, they set sail for the United States and a
new life.
Ms. Marokvia kept wartime journals and diaries. In 1944 she burned them, alerted that the
Gestapo was on the way to her door in Bergheim. "This slice of life, 50 years in the past, is a
tragicomic mural on the walls of a cave," she writes. "My memory, like a flashlight, its batteries
half spent, conjures stray images out of the darkness."
The batteries may be weakening, but the images are vivid, the lives truly extraordinary. Ms.
Marokvia, who wrote about her childhood in "Immortelles: Memoir of a Will-o'-the Wisp," is at
work on a third volume of her memoirs. At a steady pace, she could finish it by her 100th
birthday.
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company